Another powerful post by Clive Best on how earth’s surface temperatures change by means of changing meridional heat transfers. Meridional Warming.

The key point for me was seeing how the best geological knowledge proves beyond the shadow of a doubt how the earth’s climate profile shifts over time, as presented in the diagram above.  It comes from esteemed paleoclimatologist Christopher Scotese.  His compete evidence and analysis can be reviewed in his article Some thoughts on Global Climate Change: The Transition from Icehouse to Hothouse (here).

In that essay Scotese shows where we are presently in this cycle between icehouse and hothouse.

As of 2015 earth is showing a GMT of 14.4C, compared to pre-industrial GMT of 13.8C.  According to the best geological evidence from millions of years of earth’s history, that puts us in the category “Severe Icehouse.”  So, thankfully we are warming up, albeit very slowly.

Moreover, and this is Clive Best’s point, progress toward a warming world means flattening the profile at the higher latitudes, especially the Arctic.  Equatorial locations remain at 23C throughout the millennia, while the gradient decreases in a warmer world.

The previous post explained what is wrong with averaging temperature anomalies.  See Temperature Misunderstandings

Conclusion:

We have many, many centuries to go before the earth can warm up to the “Greenhouse” profile, let alone get to “Hothouse.”  Regional and local climates at higher latitudes will see slightly warming temperatures and smaller differences from equatorial climates.  These are facts based on solid geological evidence, not opinions or estimates from computer models.

It is still a very cold world, but we are moving in the right direction.  Stay the course.

Meanwhile, keep firing away Clive.

Clive Best provides this animation of recent monthly temperature anomalies which demonstrates how most variability in anomalies occur over northern continents.

Beyond the issues with the measurements and the questionable adjustments, there is a more fundamental misconception about air temperatures in relation to “climate change.” Clive Best does a fine job explaining why Global Mean Temperature anomalies do not mean what people think. Below is my synopsis of his recent essay entitled Do Global Temperatures make sense? (link)

Background: Earth’s Heat Imbalance

ERBE measurements of radiative imbalance.

The earth’s temperature at any location is never in equilibrium. It changes daily, seasonally and annually. Incoming solar radiation varies enormously especially near the poles which receive more energy per day in summer than the equator.

The earth cools primarily by moving heat from hot tropical regions towards high latitudes where net IR radiation loss cools the planet, thus maintaining a certain temperature profile.

Key Point: Heat Distribution Changes, not Global Temperatures

Rising CO2 levels modify that radiation imbalance profile slightly. Surface temperatures in the tropics are not really warming at all. Any excess heat induces more clouds and more convection while surface temperatures remain constant. What really happens is that the meridional radiation profile changes. Slightly more heat is transported polewards so that hot places are shifting more heat to cold places which are doing the warming. If CO2 levels stop rising then a new temperature and radiation profile would rather quickly be reached. This is then called ‘climate change’ but any such changes are concentrated in colder regions of the world. The global ‘temperature’ itself is not changing, but instead the global distribution of temperature is changing.

Key Point: More Atmospheric Heat means Warming in the Coldest Places

Temperatures at the poles during 6 months of darkness would fall well below -150C if there was no atmosphere, similar to the moon. Instead heat is constantly being transported from lower latitudes by the atmosphere and ocean and so that temperatures never fall much below -43C. If more heat is transported northwards than previously, then minimum temperatures must rise, and this is what we observe in individual measurements.

Key Point: GMT Anomalies Are Dominated by the Highest Latitudes

The main problem with all the existing observational datasets is that they don’t actually measure the global temperature at all. Instead they measure the global average temperature ‘anomaly’. . .The use of anomalies introduces a new bias because they are now dominated by the larger ‘anomalies’ occurring at cold places in high latitudes. The reason for this is obvious, because all extreme seasonal variations in temperature occur in northern continents, with the exception of Antarctica. Increases in anomalies are mainly due to an increase in the minimum winter temperatures, especially near the arctic circle. 

To take an extreme example here is the monthly temperature data and calculated anomalies for Verkoyhansk in Siberia. Annual temperatures vary from -50C in winter to +20C in summer. That is a seasonal range of 70C each year, and a year to year anomaly variation of ~8C is normal. The only global warming effect evident is a slight increase in the minimum winter temperatures since 1900. That is not due to any localised enhanced greenhouse effect but rather to an enhanced meridional heat transport. Temperatures in equatorial regions meanwhile have only ~4C seasonal variations, and show essentially no warming trend.

Long term changes in temperature anomalies occur mainly in northern continents in winter months. This is not because the earth as a whole is warming up but rather that meridional heat transport from the equator to the poles has increased and the largest effect on ‘anomalies occurs in winter. The average absolute temperature of the earth’s surface is unknown. Basing the evidence for climate change on the 150 year trend in global averaged temperature anomalies still biases the result towards higher latitudes where most of the stations are located.

Summary

When heat is released into the atmosphere from the oceans, it is transported toward the poles to dissipate into space. Places in higher latitudes are warmed, not by radiative effects of greenhouse gases in those locales, but by the incursion of warmer air from the equator.

What happens if more CO2 is added into the atmosphere? No one knows, but there are many opinions, a popular one being that more heat is retained in the atmosphere. But in that case, that additional heat will be shed by the planet in exactly the same manner: transport to the poles with slightly less extremely cold air at the higher latitudes.

Why in the world would we pay anything to prevent a little bit of warming in the world’s coldest places?

Clive Best takes the analysis further and relates to work by Christopher Scotese in a later post Fact: Future Climate Will Be Flatter, not Hotter

Footnote: Scott Pruitt provides a concise synopsis of the issues in measuring global surface temperatures.  From his responses to Senators’ questions during confirmation hearings:

Senator Merkley:

Are you aware that each of the past three decades has been warmer than the one before, and warmer than all the previous decades since record keeping began in the 1880s? This trend is based on actual temperature measurements. Do you believe that there is uncertainty in this warming trend that has been directly measured? If so, please explain.

Nominee Pruitt:

I am aware of a diverse range of conclusions regarding global temperatures, including that over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming, which some scientists refer to as the “hiatus.”
I am also aware that the discrepancy between land-based temperature stations and satellite temperature stations can be attributed to expansive urbanization within in our country where artificial substances such as asphalt can interfere with the accuracy of land-based temperature stations and that the agencies charged with keeping the data do not accurately account for this type of interference.
I am also aware that ‘warmest year ever’ claims from NASA and NOAA are based on minimal temperature differences that fall within the margin of error.
Finally, I am aware that temperatures have been changing for millions of years that predate the relatively short modern record keeping efforts that began in 1880.

More Q&A is at Running the Climate Gauntlet

More explanation at The Climate Water Wheel

Some reporters are showing an interest in a lesser known proxy for climate change: giant clams. Of course, some scientists claim clams prove unprecedented global warming this century. Unsurprising since their funding (clams) depends on sounding the alarms.

For some insight into the connection between clams and climate, here is a paper Giant clam recorders of ENSO variability (here).

Giant clam stable isotope profiles from Papua New Guinea faithfully record all the major El Niño events between 1986 and 2003, thus illustrating the usefulness of this archive to reconstruct past ENSO variability. Elliott et al.

In northern Papua New Guinea precipitation and temperatures are coupled on seasonal and interannual timescales. El Niño periods are associated with lower than average SST and drier conditions, whereas La Niña periods are associated with higher than average SST and wetter conditions. The associated changes in sea water δ18O and SST will thus have cumulative effects on shell δ18O, which will become more positive during El Niño and more negative during La Niña phases.

Figure 2: Comparison of T. gigas δ18O profile with ENSO index, local temperature and rainfall data. A) NINO3.4 index, (B) 3pt smoothed monthly rainfall anomaly (mm day-1, NASA/GPCPV2) for 146.25°E, 6.25°S, (C) T. gigas δ18O record, (D) Porites δ18O profiles and (E) 3pt smoothed monthly SST anomaly (from IGOSS) for the same grid box as the rainfall data. Y-axes of the δ18O are inverted. The shaded bands indicate El Niño events.

The comparison of the ENSO index with the T. gigas and Porites δ18O records shows that each El Niño event is recorded in the shell and coral profile by isotopic shifts of around 1.0 to 1.2‰ toward more positive values (Fig. 2) reflecting the combined influence of lower temperatures and decreased rainfall. During the El Niño phase of the Southern Oscillation, the region experiences relative drought and slightly reduced SSTs (~-0.2 to -0.5°C anomaly, see Fig. 2). These factors combine to drive skeletal δ18O to heavy values, with SST explaining about 30-50% of the skeletal δ18O range.

Take away message

We show that shells of T. gigas can be used to produce multi-decadal climatic records, hence providing a valuable resource for investigating changes to the frequency and strength of ENSO events in the past. The excellent reproducibility of clam and coral δ18O profiles illustrates the strength of using these archives to reconstruct large-scale hydrographic changes.

Some points worth noting: Clamshell variability is influenced by precipitation as well as water temperature. And water temperatures do not simply correlate to air temperatures. Finally, it is the water heating the air, not the other way around.

The data is good, but the interpretation can be biased by warmist beliefs.

Animation showing the 25-year and 40-year trends in surface air temperature in the Cowtan and Way v2.0 dataset, with plots to the right showing the fraction of the earth surface in a cooling trend (the blue areas in maps).

Ed Hawkins at his blog provides above the display of variability of warming and cooling across the globe. The post is entitled Regional Temperatures This Century (here).

We found that some regions experience periods of cooling at this timeframe even when global temperature is increasing rapidly. Cooling periods of 25 years duration occurred in 13 to 74 % of the earth surface through the observed record, and cooling periods of 40 years occurred in 6 to 71% of the earth surface, including in the most recent decades. Cooling periods are more prevalent where the long-term trend is low such as in the Southern Ocean, and/or where decadal variability is high such as Pacific Ocean regions influenced by the Inter-Decadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO). However, there are cases where low trend or high variability due to the IPO (or Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation) are not the only factors, and there may be a role for forcings and other regional effects. These cases include the well-known ‘warming hole’ in the south east US through the last half of the 20th Century (noting this ‘hole’ has an important seasonal aspect to it) and the recent cooling in northern Australia linked to increasing cloud and rainfall.

He refers to the cooling regions as “warming holes”. Since there are periods where cooling dominates globally, we could also refer to exceptional regions as “warm spots.” This shows dynamically how regional climate trends differ over time. For example, over the last century in the continental US, about a third of land stations showed cooling trends contrary to the slightly warming average overall.

Cautionary note regarding the Cowtan and Way 2.0 Dataset

This dataset is controversial in its use of “krieging” to spread temperature readings from a handful of land stations across the full extent of the Arctic (and Antarctic) including surfaces of ocean, ice and mixtures of the two. As the charts show, this results in extra warming in the Arctic, double the trend shown by UAH (satellite) dataset.

Another example of the inconsistency of “global warming” is provided by NOAA’s presentation of continental temperatures. (here) The table below is for October 2016, and shows not only variability, but also how land temperatures are falling following El Nino’s disappearance.

H/t to Bill Illis and Tony Heller

As the graphs show, global warming is indeed man made. It is achieved by adjustments producing a warming trend in station records where no such trend existed.

A similar pattern is found and analyzed in my study of the highest quality US stations Temperature Data Review Project–My Submission